


Writing White

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Hardcore Obliquity, Homophobia, Letters, M/M, Stealth Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-19
Updated: 2016-03-19
Packaged: 2018-05-27 16:16:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6291364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Happiness writes white.</p><p>*</p><p>Note: no directly homophobic language or content, but the whole premise of the story emerges from systemic homophobia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Writing White

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AMarguerite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMarguerite/gifts).



> To A Marguerite's prompt: 'Ralph/Laurie: things you said when we were the happiest we ever were.'

Neither of them had a knack for happiness. They had both learned to distrust it, either as a delusive property apt to be summarily confiscated, or a dissolute specialism, the pursuit of which interfered with obligation and duty. But nor did they feel entitled to unhappiness, which they called self-pity, as if to acknowledge an ordinary despondency would deprive those in abject distress of their title to it, a propensity which if nothing else indicated a touching belief in the finitude of human misery. They shared a capacity to extend compassion, as they likewise lacked that rarer gift, the humility to accept it.

And yet happiness followed them, found them, favoured them: in Wade Abbas cathedral close as snow began to fall on Christmas Eve, incapable with laughter on the floor of a hotel room in Valletta, breakfasting on a café terrace on the Singel canal bridge, in the snug of Milne’s Bar in Edinburgh with a languid, handsome schoolmaster and a ruffled journalist; after an incredible stroke of good luck in the boatyard at Aegina; most often, though, at one of the thirty-four addresses called, at one time or another by one or both of them, _home_. Happiness speaks at inaudible frequencies: infra- or ultrasonically present in commonplace, pedantry and catchphrase, in the repertoire of inarticulate noises appreciated by only the most intimate audience. 

Nothing in their early life together, which might be more precisely called their early life _apart_ , had encouraged either of them to leave written hostages to fortune. But both, somewhat to their astonishment, for the beginning of things had been farcically inauspicious, found themselves happier than they had been for many years, and they longed to tell each other so. _Do you know the impulse Yeats writes about in 'Her Praise'?_ Laurie wrote, distrustfully transcribing the poem in full, _because I do. (I repress it, naturally.)_ But henceforth, a paragraph beginning _I will talk no more of books or the long war_ sufficed to let Ralph know that Laurie had heroically quashed the urge to draw his name into conversation. 

Yeats was one of Laurie’s staples. Not the swaying _symboliste_ of the Nineties, of course, whose heady concoctions Ralph would rather have volunteered for indefinite station-keeping at night, watch and watch about, than admit he thrilled to, but the flatulent, fraudulent late warlock. Nonetheless, an offhand line relaying _Edmund’s regards (he still has that hideous stuffed green parrot in his rooms)_ could sustain him through weeks of boredom, fear and strain, because it not only alluded, via the title’s black centaur, to the physical love they both craved, but meant ‘I have loved you better than my soul for all my words.’ An afternoon of coarse and hilarious speculation on the proclivities of various literary and historical figures, meanwhile, was commemorated by a sheaf of nature notes, the most enduring of which, a description of the flight of the kestrel, designated Ralph’s desire for, or Laurie’s intention to perform, a particularly vigorous exercise in delay and discipline. 

Ralph was disposed to be indulgently charmed by Laurie’s penchant for the Border Ballads, which accounted as much as their general inaptness to purpose for their underrepresentation. A reference to meeting Bill Winsbury, however, signified Laurie’s high regard for Ralph’s looks and physique; if a meal or drink was specified, that he had sought somatic relief for his frustrated feelings on the point. Ralph’s macabre enthusiasm for ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ was represented in his dubbing certain brother and superior officers―or their Lordships as a corporate body―‘the EKs,’ for ‘eldern knichts’, a phrase containing vituperation of a depth and extent inexpressible by mere obscenity. 

With less of a bent to allusion, and (his ferociously private passion for Malory excepted) a taste in literature more likely to be shared by the censor, Ralph contributed less voluminously but more personally to the corpus, chiefly reminiscence of their innocuous activities on a day when some momentous carnality also took place: the anecdotes retailed by an eighty-seven-year-old former whaler in the Ship Leopard; the water tower on Barham Downs at two a.m., louring black against the blackout; the church at Broughton with its wall-painting of Christ dismembered by oaths sworn upon his person ( _thank ― for the Reformation_ ); Elaine Morell’s party at the Arts & Battledress (!!!). The last, with its invariable garnish of puerile exclamation marks, disappeared from the compendium after John Morell was drowned, to Laurie’s somewhat ambivalent relief, for that evening, watching Ralph pay due court to the birthday girl, he’d had the first of his rare but distinct intimations that Ralph’s excursions into bisexuality were not wholly _voulu_. 

Many of the cyphers survived the war; in repairing an estrangement of many months brought about ostensibly by the General Election of 1945 but in truth by the recognition that neither of them could stand to live in the other’s pocket, they deployed them more liberally than ever. The code served them well through the twitchy, narcotised Fifties, and by the time, late in the following decade, that a measure of liberation had been achieved, had become as habitual as their other chosen anodynes. And so it happened, in the winter of 1983, that Laurie, a mischievous smile breaking for a moment his bleakly desolate expression, spoke over the coffin of a _man who used to notice such things_ , such familiar things as the buffeted, jolting hover of a kestrel as it faces into the wind.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeats: ['Her Praise'](http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/778/) and ['On A Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac'](http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/on-a-picture-of-a-black-centaur-by-edmund-dulac/)
> 
> The Ballads: [Willie O'Winsbury](http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch100.htm), [Sir Patrick Spens](http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch058.htm).
> 
> Wade Abbas cathedral has crept in from Antonia Forest's Marlows books, the water tower on Barham Downs from Jocelyn Brooke's trilogy of memoirs, and the Morells from _The Cruel Sea_. 
> 
> Laurie quotes Thomas Hardy's self-elegy [Afterwards](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/afterwards).


End file.
